Thursday, January 31, 2013

All day people poured into Asano Park, This private estate was far enough away from the explosion so that its bamboos, pines, laurel, and maples were still alive, and the green place invited refugees—partly because they believed that if the Americans came back, they would bomb only the buildings; partly because the foliage seemed a center of coolness and life, and the estate’s exquisitely precise rock gardens, with their quiet pools and arching bridges, were very Japanese, normal, secure; and also partly (according to some who were there) because of an irresistible, atavistic urge to hide under leaves.
--John Hersey, Hiroshima

Refreshments and coffee starting at 10 a.m.Free and open to the public. My contact person there, Ph. D. Kevin Mongrain, is an Associate Professor at the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts, a scholar of Hans Urs von Balthasar, and an author. I was so excited about the prospect of coming to Pittsburgh (where I've never been before), that somehow we got to talking and next thing I knew he was offering me a suite at the Gailliot Center for a bit longer than the planned three days.

I am quite taken with the whole notion of a "suite," and post-haste got on kayak.com and booked a ticket for a week. So I'll be in Pittsburgh from Feb. 25 through March 3 and before I'd even told anyone I coincidentally heard from a lovely priest at St. Paul of the Cross Monastery and Retreat House across the river who ended up sending me all kinds of maps and brochures and offering to show me around Pittsburgh or "Pgh" as the people from there seem to spell it.

I love the idea of getting to wander around the arts district of a new city: going to Mass, drinking coffee and listening to the accents. It will be Lent so I will probably be abstaining from sugar and thus in a low, desolate, self-pitying mood but I'm sure the good folks from Pgh will cheer me right up.

So thank you in advance for having me!

Then there's my recent post, "The Existential Nostalgia of TV," in which I copped to the fact that I haven't much watched TV since the days of Mister Ed. A few days later I received a little package in the mail. No card, no indication of the sender--but instantly I discerned the hand of my beloved little brother joe...

“Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” [Acts 9:4] Authentic conversion always comes from realizing that we have been “persecuting” Christ.

In the fall of 1986, I spent thirty days at an addiction treatment center in rural Minnesota. Hiking trails meandered through the woods. The trees were turning color. One morning I crept out for a walk just past dawn. Not another soul stirred. I came upon a pond and, through the mist, saw a blue heron, standing stock still, noble head erect. I saw the heron and the heron saw me.

It was a moment from the Song of Songs, a moment of liminal space and time, an instant of such heart-stopping beauty that in my memory it has attained the level of myth. All those years while I’d been in the bars, this heron, or one like him, had been coming to the pond. All those years while I’d been drinking morningSea Breezes at Boston’s Sullivan’s Tap, another parallel world had been breathing, suffering, praising God. Many years passed before I discovered Christ, and more years after that before I came into the Church. But in a way I can mark my conversion from that moment. In a way that heron was Christ, saying, “Heather, Heather, why are you persecuting me?”

St. Paul fell off his horse, but Christ comes in the form of a lamb, a dove, a heron. That’s not to say he’s always gentle. But he’s often gentlest when we’ve been doing terrible violence to ourselves and others. Christ never cuts us down with a gun or a sword. He looks at us with love. He says, Look at these blue-gray feathers. He says, Isn’t it lovely to be still and listen to the frogs? He looks us in the eye with love and says, “Why are you persecuting me?”

To be forgiven when we know we don’t “deserve” to be forgiven is radically transformative in a way violence can never be. To be forgiven does another kind of violence: to our whole tit-for-tat notion of crime and punishment. To be forgiven makes us realize that, unbelievable as it may seem, God needs us for something. We have a mission.

My experience with the heron wasn’t a white-light experience. It was a door opening onto what has proved to be a long and very slow spiritual awakening of, as William James put it, “the educational variety.” How often I’ve forgotten the heron. How often I’ve been harsh, rageful, importunate, intolerant, unfaithful, unkind, and just plain wrong.

When that happens I’m struck blind for a few hours or days or even months. Often a long time passes before I see that once again, I’ve been persecuting Christ.

Our offense doesn’t lie in breaking a rule. It lies in offending against love, against truth,

against beauty. What’s remarkable about St. Paul isn’t that he had a white light experience. What’s remarkable is that he retained his fervor for all the remaining years of his life.

Monday, January 21, 2013

"Hey aged relative-do you have [our brother] Ross's address? I bought Allen [our nephew] a signed 8x10 glossy of Martin Milner from 1-Adam 12. I know he likes the show."

Me: "Who's Martin Milner?"

Joe: "Martin Milner? Are you tripping? Pete Malloy from One Adam 12? The greatest cop show in the history of tv? Late 60's-early 70's? It was produced by Jack Webb so there's all sorts of killer episodes of stoned hippy parents who beat their children to death or let them drown while they're smoking marijuana cigarettes. Funny as hell."

Me: "As you may know, my TV watching came to a screeching halt right around the time 'Mr. Ed' completed its run"...

Even earlier were such New England staples as Rex Trailer's "Boomtown," "Candlepins for Cash," and "Community Auditions," which was on Sunday morning and featured kids from Boston suburbs like Brockton and Malden (Mawlden, the people from Mass. pronounced it) massacreing "Climb Every Mountain," mangling "Für Elise" on the piano, and banging out "When the Saints Come Marching In" on cheesy drum sets.

"Star of the day, who will it be?" went the theme song. "Your vote will hold the key. It's up to you, tell us who, will be star of the day." Gene Burns was the host for years, followed by "radio personality" Dave Maynard. We'd all hoot and jeer and double over laughing, secretly thinking, in my case at least, I bet I could do that...

All eight of us were weaned on "Leave It to Beaver," "Andy of Mayberry," "Green Acres," "I Love Lucy," and "The Beverly Hillbillies" (Joe sometimes still calls me Ellie Mae, or if he's feeling ornery, Granny). The launching of the ipad had nothing on the furor surrounding the day UHF, the “cable” equivalent of the ‘60s, came to town, and from our living room at 108 Post Road in North Hampton, NH, we were able to get channels 38 and 56: "Creature Feature," "The Twilight Zone," "The Outer Limits."

One of the first things I bought after I got sober was a Sony Trinitron (which I held onto for 20 years), but I never quite caught up. TV for me is forever the weeks of excitement leading up to the annual screening of The Wizard of Oz. TV is sitting in the dark as the phosphorescent glow lit our (relatively) innocent little faces, and logs from the fireplace Dad built with his own hands sent out sparks and the smell of pine pitch. TV for me is still a tangle of warm little bodies kicking, squirming, wisecracking, that back then seemed annoying (why couldn't I be an only child? I thought bitterly as I edged into adolescence) and that now I'd give my right arm for one more night of.

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Check out my interview in The Fix this week with my dear long-time friend Ann Leary. Her new novel, The Good House, was published to rave reviews this week and is selling like hotcakes.

INSIDE THE MIND OF AN ALCOHOLIC

Ann Leary and I met 25 years ago in Boston, before we thought ourselves capable of writing a coherent grocery list, let alone an entire book. We were just getting sober. We each went on to write books—several, in fact—as I move to Los Angeles and "got religion" and Ann got a husband, actor and comic Denis Leary (before he was famous!).

Now they have two children and live in rural Connecticut. Happily, Ann and I have remained close friends who can always make each other laugh. We sat down recently to talk about her new novel, The Good House, out January 15 from St. Martin’s Press. It’s set in a small New England town and is told from the point of view of a woman named Hildy Good, who just might have a problem with alcohol.

Heather King: Ann, you and I got sober together in Boston and the North Shore. A small town on the North Shore is the setting for your new novel, which captures the feel of the place, the zeitgeist of old money, flinty and eccentric New Englanders, lobster fishermen—and the repressed emotion, alcoholism, driving the back roads wasted.

Ann Leary: I love New Englanders. I moved to Marblehead from Wisconsin when I was 14 and I have been fascinated by the New England personality ever since. I felt like such an outsider when we moved there. Many of my classmates had lived in Marblehead all their lives. Some were descendants of Marblehead’s earliest settlers. My classmates had a shared history that I envied. I also was very aware of the way this town had its own personality. The neighboring towns had slightly different personalities, each formed by the collective quirkiness of the characters who had founded them and whose descendants still inhabited them...

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Recently I posted on Shin Dong-hyuk's 2005 escape from a North Korean death camp. My friend Bill and I had dinner the other night and I was thrilled to learn that he's somewhat of an expert on North Korean history. We marveled at the almost hysterical devotion to Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong-Il, in spite of the harsh repression, widespread famine, and hundreds of thousands of brutal killings committed under their watch.

Afterward he sent me the three featured youtubes. I wrote back:

"It's as if the identities of the North Koreans have all been subsumed to "The Great Leader"--exactly the opposite of the follower of Christ where (ideally) we 'obey' out of love and thus are revealed in Him...maybe that's why I like stories of the survivors--to be reminded that each of those people is a human being with a heart, mind, soul"...

To which Bill replied:

There is a radical difference between the lessons of Matthew 18:3 ["Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven]and Mark 10:15, and the infantilization-by-terror of the people of North Korea. And it's far too easy to imagine these people as robots when they're quite the opposite. The darkness we see in nighttime images from space of North Korea is like a pall of suffering.

"In this book . . . I aim to explain North Korea's dominant ideology or worldview — I use the words interchangeably— and to show how far removed it is from communism, Confucianism and the show-window doctrine of Juche Thought. Far from complex, it can be summarized in a single sentence: The Korean people are too pure blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader."

From the book:

"Many in the West, of course, continue to doubt that the North Koreans really believe in their personality cult. This skepticism derives in part from recollections of the double lives led in the old East Bloc, where the average educated citizen feigned fervent support for his country's leader in formal settings only to joke about him behind closed doors. But this only goes to show how little the East Bloc and North Korea ever had in common, for the masses' adoration of Kim Il Sung has always been very real. Even among the few North Koreans who have left the country and stayed out, a heartfelt admiration for the Great Leader is mainstream (I personally know migrants who still cannot talk of him without tearing up). This has much to do with the far greater psychological appeal of nationalism itself, but Kim Il Sung's peculiarly androgynous or hermaphroditic image also seems to exert a far more emotional attraction than any of the unambiguously paternal leaders of Eastern Europe were able to. I am not qualified to analyze the cult (of anything else) from a psychological viewpoint, but just enough should be written here to counter the reader's skepticism that sane people could give themselves over to the adoration of a male mother figure. Sigmund Freud wrote of every child's yearning for a phallic mother, a truly omnipotent parent who is both sexes in one, and Ernest Becker agreed that the hermaphroditic image answers a striving for ontological wholeness that is inherent to man. This may explain why Jesus and Buddha are far more feminine and maternal figures in the popular imagination than in the original scriptures of Christianity and Buddhism. The North Koreans' race theory gives them extra reason to want a leader who is both mother enough to indulge their unique childlikeness and father enough to protect them from the evil world."

NORTH KOREANS MOURNING THE DEATH OF KIM IL SUNG (1912-1994).
1 MILLION PEOPLE ARE PURPORTED TO HAVE DIED THROUGH CONCENTRATION CAMPS, FORCED LABOR, AND EXECUTIONS UNDER HIS REGIME.

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

There is no one who does not experience a hundred small annoyances every day, caused either by our own carelessness or inattention, or by the inconsideration or spite of other people, or by pure accident. Our whole lives are made up on incidents of this kind, occurring ceaselessly from one minute to another, and producing a host of involuntary feelings of dislike and aversion, envy, fear, and impatience to trouble the serenity of our minds…If we were careful to offer all these petty annoyances to God and accept them as being ordered by his providence, we would soon be in a position to support the greatest misfortunes that can happen to us, besides at the same time insensibly drawing close to intimate union with God.

Well isn't that the truth? The other day, driving around L.A. on a series of pesky errands, I started thinking about Thomas Merton's famous "moment" on a street corner in Louisville where, suffused with love, he realized "There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun." I thought, a bit churlishly to be sure, Yeah, I'd think people were shining like the sun as well, if I didn't have to wade through them every day. I see the monks "shining like the sun" when I visit a monastery, too--mostly because I don't have to live with them...

That's not to detract in any way from Merton's truly beautiful epiphany; it's only to observe that the real feat for me would be to see Christ in the people who are in my way 24/7, as I jostle for a parking spot, a place in line, my earplugs at night to block out the sound of their obnoxiously yipping dogs....

Recently I heard a guy tell of a spiritual practice he's discovered. He says thank you to God not only for the things that make life easier, but for the things that make it harder, scarier, more painful. He lost his wallet at the movie theater: he got home, gritted his teeth, thanked God, and the theater called the next day and said they'd found it. He lost the wallet again, this time at a bowling alley--again, he thanked God; again, the wallet miraculously turned up. A third time he lost the wallet, on a visit to his aunt in Arizona. Again, he said, "Thank you, God;" a third time the wallet was returned.

I thought, My God man, put the wallet in a different pocket!

Still, I think the guy's onto something. Because what happens with a hundred (at LEAST!) small annoyances a day is that I, for one, can start going around with a low-grade hostility. I can fritter away my energy in a kind of constant self-defense, self-justification, scheming, planning, pre-emptive damage control mode...

Thanking God when your mother's just gone up in a Nazi crematorium, or when you've been called into the torture chamber, or when you're watching through the glass as your kid is executed might be a bit much to ask, but maybe I, who have never known such trauma, can give thanks to be alive, even in a world where God has given man free will and we so often use it to kill each other.

Again and again during the course of my day, I have to return to: How important is it? Would I rather be right or would I rather be happy?

Again and again, I have to pray, Let me come from a place of love. Then, with a whole lot of luck and a whole lot of grace, I can get back to Oh God bless her, with her three dogs; I'm just jealous cause she's young and beautiful. I can think, How amazing that a city of ten million works at all, never mind as well as it does. I can think, Look! There's a red-hot poker--one of the first signs of spring...

Friday, January 11, 2013

I was once accused of heresy, which made me very happy because I thought my books would sell more. And the heresy that I apparently had given birth to, and I kept hoping, again, that it would be known by the name “Albacetism,” was that I was told to have said at a priest’s retreat, not here, someplace else, that I did not believe God was everywhere. Now, I don’t know very much about that. Never mind. I said to the inquisition, to the judges, “No, if you want I will sign any statement that affirms that I believe that God is everywhere.” I have no problem with that. My problem is that everybody that I know, everybody that I care about, I have found is always somewhere in some place at some time. I can say, “Here.” If they are everywhere, I don’t know how to handle it. If you know exactly where they are and at what time…I used to carry two watches; one was a time someplace else, one was the current time here in New York because there are times at which I don’t even know how to add or subtract, but it doesn’t matter. Whenever I wanted to know where so-and-so was at that moment, what they were doing, (I would sometimes think about Fr. Giussani himself), I didn’t have to calculate anything—not that this was a major calculation, okay? But I would just look, and my watch would have the same time as his watch. And that made me happy. Little things like that make you happy. When you’re in love with someone, the same thing. So these people have always been someplace, and that’s the way I like it. I don’t like people who are everywhere!...

We read again and again the manifestation of Jesus’ reality to his disciples even before His death and resurrection. What kind of effect did His Presence have? His look? His gestures? Amazement. Amazement that such a thing is possible. Profound curiosity begins to appear: “Tell me more”…or… “I don’t understand, but this is interesting.”

You see, part of the success of the dominant secularist culture is to try to succeed in hiding how interesting the Christian claim is, how beautiful, but above all, how interesting. And how does it do it? By killing anything that’s interesting, by deciding itself what is interesting, by diminishing the reality of interesting, especially in our youth...

[T]his is our redemption, salvation. This is what Christ has come to do—to revive, to give life to our interest so that we can recognize His victory, and therefore our victory, over those forces that diminish us, that reduce the experience of our dignity, that reduce even the range of our reason and of our desires. The only thing that can break through that shell constructed around our inner selves, our heart, by this culture of death, the only way to break through is with the power of the interesting...
Check out the rest! And thank you, Monsignor...

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

A reader recently e-mailed expressing interest in learning about confession so as to bring it into her (non-Catholic) circles. She had only one question: did the sexism in the Church ever bother me?

I replied, “What sexism?”

She thought I was kidding, but I was serious. I'm with Flannery O'Connor who said, "On the subject of this feminist business, I just never...think of qualities which are specifically feminine or masculine. I suppose I [divide] people into two classes: the Irksome and the Non-Irksome without regard to sex."

St. Thérèse of Lisieux observed: “I have found my vocation at last: in the heart of my mother the Church I will be love….like that I will be everything…and so my dream will be fulfilled.”

That is my dream, too. I can only witness to my own experience. The Church has never done anything but support that, encourage that, and help to make that possible.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Last post I mentioned a reader who expressed interest in bringing the gift of confession into her own (non-Catholic) circles. In its way, this is lovely. But Confession the way I understand it--and there's a world of difference between that small “c” and a capital “C”--is a Sacrament, the only possible two authentic participants being a Catholic priest and a penitent.

Now I find it very interesting that left to our own devices we do have a moral compass, a conscience, for it very much goes toward the idea that deep inside every man, woman and child is the fundamental idea of God. For years, in fact, I’ve availed myself of fellow sober alcoholics with whom to do general moral inventories on resentments, fears and sex. On that level—one broken human being to another; one sinner if you like to another—this works beautifully. In fact, this kind of being heard by (and in turn, listening to) a fellow alcoholic in large part led me to Christ and the Church. But the personal conscience, formed by nothing higher than its own lights, has limits. It’s one thing to tell another human being, for example, that you’ve had an abortion, if for no other reason than to get it off your chest, to say This is who I am and what I’ve done; to get in the habit of rigorous honesty; to cultivate the discipline of examining one's conscience. It’s wonderful to find no judgment—in fact, maybe the other person’s had an abortion, too—to find, There, I said it out loud and I haven’t been ejected from the human race.

But it’s another thing entirely to know that abortion is an egregious wrong and to want to be clean with God, to be absolved from it. That’s not going to happen in telling another person who may or may not see abortion as any kind of wrong. So early in my sobriety I saw there’s a general moral order and then there’s a specific moral order in which I was willing to be guided, to be instructed, to be obedient. Because once I got sober, I became very very interested in the truth: the deepest truth about myself, the world, the human condition. And I saw you can’t just make up the moral order as you go along. You can’t just go on your intentions, on what at first glance “makes sense.” Oh let’s just be free, we tell ourselves. Let’s do what we want as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. Well, what does “hurt” mean? If there’s no objective moral order, there’s no objective measure of what it means to hurt someone. One person is going to think promiscuity is fine and another person isn’t. One person’s going to encourage cheating on your taxes; another’s going to call that stealing. One person’s going to think guns are the anti-Christ and another’s going to want to arm every student and every teacher in the name of loving protection.

Those questions are one reason I went into the law, but the law, being man-made, similarly has limits. In civil law we try to make people whole with money and in criminal law we try to make people whole by locking up the criminal and my experience, in the mercifully short time I practiced, was that nobody was ever much made whole at all.

So you have to have a specific moral order and you'll want to consecrate that order in time and space and thus we have the Sacraments. And we need people to administer the Sacraments and in the Catholic church those people are priests. The Sacrament of Holy Orders, in the case of Confession, protects the confessor from thinking he’s an oracle with some extraordinary or supernatural power of his own, and it protects the penitent from a priest who might otherwise interpose a moral code of his own personal devising.

Which means, and here's another interesting thing, that the worst sinning ordained priest could validly hear Confession and offer absolution while the most high-minded layperson, male or female, could not. Because the operative fact isn’t that the priest is sinning; it’s that he’s pledged himself to an authority greater than himself; to dogma that plumbs to the depths of the human soul and that was devised not by him alone, that does not change from one minute to the next with fashions, moods, and/or political movements. Dogma safeguards mystery. Dogma is the Church’s way of saying, This is what love looks like: per Christ, via Christ, for two thousand unbroken centuries built on the Real Body and the Real Blood of Christ. We might waver but our True North is constant.

I have many times sat across from, and told some of my darkest secrets to, gay ex-methheads, convicted felons, functional illiterates, and all sorts of other unpromising folks like myself, to truly great effect. I have become friends with many of these people; they have been deeply loyal and generous friends to me. But I’m not going to kneel before that person. That I want to kneel; that the Church is built, in a sense, upon that very desire, makes me know that my house is built on solid rock.I continue to fail and fall, but my house is built on solid rock.

One of Wood’s main theses is that O’Connor--the novelist, short story writer, and devout Catholic--preferred the excesses of fundamentalism, which at least takes God seriously enough to take him literally, to the bland “civil religion” practiced by most Americans, including most Catholics.

"O’Connor discerned that something deadly had occurred when national identity had been made to trump religious faith”…

“[Her] objection to a blithe indifferentism concerning truth and error, to an all-tolerant notion that one church or synagogue or mosque is as good as another, to a reduction of doctrinal and communal faith to uncritical moral earnestness, was also voiced by the Jesuit Gustave Weigel in a debate with the liberal Protestant Robert McAfee Brown: 'The average Protestant seems to think it makes little difference what you believe so long as you are decent and virtuous. About the only faith he seems to demand is the one implied in the sincere effort to do the right thing' "…

'Not only did the civil religion of the 1950s melt particularized historic faiths into a thin religious gruel; it also made even the most secular Americans into allegedly religious people. As Dwight Eisenhower once declared, 'Our government makes no sense…unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith…and I don’t care what it is.' "

"Religion itself, as James C. Edwards once put it, has become another consumer choice at the smorgasbord of the American emporium”…

As Wood points out, the final showdown will not be between religion and science, but rather between nihilism and the Gospels:

"Though Flannery O'Connor's death came more than a quarter-century before [the Catholic novelist] Walker Percy's, the latter shared her worry about the nihilistic gas that is asphyxiating our church and culture alike. Percy believed that it was having an especially deadening effect on certain souls who sit in the high places of American cultural and ecclesiastical power. Only two years before his own death in 1990, Percy wrote a letter to The New York Times, which it refused to publish. That our national "newpaper of record" refused to run a plea voiced by one of our major novelists makes the letter all the more worth hearing:

The most influential book published in German in the first quarter of this century was entitled The Justification of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value. Its co-authors were the distinguished jurist Karl Binding and the prominent psychiatrist Alfred Hoche. Neither Binding nor Hoche had ever heard of Hitler or the Nazis.

Nor, in all likelihood, did Hitler ever read the book. He didn't have to. The point is that the ideas expressed in the book were the product not of Nazi ideology but rather of the best minds of the pre-Nazi Weimar Republic--physicians, social scientists, jurists, and the like, who with the best secular intentions wished to improve the lot, socially and genetically, of the German people--by getting rid of the unfit and the unwanted...

I would not wish to be understood as implying that the respected American institutions I have named [The New York Times, the United States Supreme Court, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization of Women] are similar or corresponding to pre-Nazi institutions.

But I do suggest that once the line is crossed, once the principle gains acceptance--juridically, medically, socially--[that] innocent human life can be destroyed for whatever reason, for the most admirable socio-economic, medical or social reasons--then it does not take a prophet to predict what will happen next, or if not next, then sooner or later. At any rate, a warning is in order. Depending on the disposition of the majority and the opinion polls--now in favor of allowing women to get rid of unwanted babies--it is not difficult to imagine an electorate or a court ten years, fifty years from now, who would favor getting rid of useless old people, retarded children, antisocial blacks, illegal Hispanics, gypsies, Jews...."

A holocaust rages in North Korea. That innocent people of all ages are suffering, starving, being shot on sight for having sex outside that ordered by the camp administration, disobeying a guard, or failing to rat out their parents is a crime against humanity, a crime against reason and truth, and a crime against Christ.

We would like to blame the [psychopathic] "dear Leader." But I wonder sometimes if we are not headed in the same direction.

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Escape from Camp 14is about the odyssey of Shin Dong-hyuk and his escape from a North Korean labor/death camp.

I missed him on 60 Minutes but the story is gripping: a national leader who punished political dissidents down to the third generation; a child born into a labor camp where, on starvation rations, for decades tens of thousands of inmates have been worked to death; the eating of insects and rats; the witnessing of a six-year-old girl beaten to death for hiding five kernels of corn; Shin's snitching out his own mother and brother (prisoners were commanded, under penalty of instant death, to spy on and report their families and friends); the seven months in a torture bunker; the witnessing of his mother and brother’s executions; the escape through an electrified fence on which his partner and friend died; the walk through China; the (inevitable) difficulty adjusting.

In spite of his gratitude to South Koreans for their asylum and help, Shin has difficulty understanding how, with such horrific suffering at their doorstep, they have not protested more loudly and widely.

Journalist Blaine Harden, author of Escape from Camp 14, points out that the general lack of concern of South Korea for North Korean is:

a blind spot that baffles local and international human rights groups. Overwhelming evidence of continuing atrocities inside the North’s labor camps has done little to rouse the South Korean public. As the Korean Bar Association has noted “South Koreans, who publicly cherish the virtue of brotherly love, have been inexplicably stuck in a deep quagmire of indifference.”

When South Korean president Lee Myung-bak was elected in 2007, just three percent of voters named North Korea as a primary concern. They told pollsters that their primary interest was in making higher salaries…

South Koreans themselves struggle mightily to fit into their own success-obsessed, status-conscious, and education-crazed culture. Shin was attempting to find his way in a society that is singularly overworked, insecure, and stressed out. South Koreans work more, sleep less, and kill themselves at a higher rate than citizens of any other developed country...

They also view each other with a witheringly critical eye. Self-worth tends to be narrowly defined by admission to a few highly selective universities and prestigious, high-paying jobs at conglomerates like Samsung, Hyundai and LG.

“This society is unforgiving, relentless, and the competition is constant,” Andrew Eungi Kim, a sociology professor at Korea University, one of the country’s most elite schools told me. “If young people do not obtain the right credentials—they call it the ‘right spec’—they become very pessimistic. They believe they cannot get started in life. The pressure to do well in school begins to build at grade four, believe it or not, and it becomes everything to students by grade seven….

Although the suicide rate in most other wealthy countries peaked in the early 1980s, it continues to climb in South Korea, doubling since 2000. The suicide rate in 2008 was two and half [sic] times higher than in the United States and significantly higher than in nearby Japan, where suicide is deeply embedded in the culture. It seems to have spread as a kind of infectious disease exacerbated by the strains of ambition, affluence, family disintegration, and loneliness.

South Korea, in other words, sounds very much like us. The First World, in its bondage to consumerism, has contrived a life outside the camps that is eerily reminiscent of the police state inside the camps.

In the camps, people are killed by guards; outside the camps, people kill themselves. Inside, people are worked to death; outside, people work themselves to death. Inside, people see their own mothers as competition for food; outside, people see their peers, classmates, friends and the world as competition for jobs. Inside, people starve to death for lack of food; outside, people “starve” to death for connection and meaning.

When it comes to my body, I live in South Korea, but in my mind I still live in the camp. I still feel I haven't quite managed to leave the camp for good. I would like to return to North Korea, my home. If it wouldn't be a labor camp any longer, I would like to live in the home where I was born. I want to farm there and live of the fruits of my own labor. Even if I would have to grow corn. [Prisoners at Camp 14 ate cabbage soup and corn three meals a day, seven days a week]. If the border to North Korea ever opens up, I want to be the first to travel back there. I want to live in the camp where I was born.

When I lived in the labor camp. I had to suffer a lot of pain. I had to go hungry and put up with beatings and punishment. because I didn't do my work well enough. But in South Korea you have to suffer when you don't have enough money. It's exhausting. It's all about money. That makes it tough for me here. When I think about it, I rarely saw someone committing suicide in the camp. Life was hard and you were an inmate your whole life. But in South Korea many people attempt suicide. They die. It may look like the people here don't want for anything. They have clothes and food. But there are more people committing suicide here than in the camp. There are news reports about that every day.

Interviewer: What do you miss of the life in North Korea?

[Shin gets out a phone and starts tapping. Looking down at the screen--]

I miss the innocence and the lack of concerns I had. In the camp where I lived I had a pure heart. I did not have to think about anything. I didn't have to think about the power of money like I do in South Korea. Though I don't miss everything from that camp, I miss the purity of my heart.

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Twenty-three years ago, on New Year's Day, I arrived in Los Angeles with my then-husband Tim and our cat, Blanche.

Blanchie died.
Tim's back East.
Happy New Year.

SOLOING

My mother tells me she dreamed
of John Coltrane, a young Trane
playing his music with such joy
and contained energy and rage
she could not hold back her tears.
And sitting awake now, her hands
crossed in her lap, the tears start
in her blind eyes. The TV set
behind her is gray, expressionless.
It is late, the neighbors quiet,
even the city—Los Angeles—quiet.
I have driven for hours down 99,
over the Grapevine into heaven
to be here. I place my left hand
on her shoulder, and she smiles.
What a world, a mother and son
finding solace in California
just where we were told it would
be, among the palm trees and all-night
super markets pushing orange
back-lighted oranges at 2 A.M.
“He was alone,” she says, and does
not say, just as I am, “soloing.”
What a world, a great man half
her age comes to my mother
in sleep to give her the gift
of song, which—shaking the tears
away—she passes on to me, for now
I can hear the music of the world
in the silence and that word:
soloing. What a world—when I
arrived the great bowl of mountains
was hidden in a cloud of exhaust,
the sea spread out like a carpet
of oil, the roses I had brought
from Fresno browned on the seat
beside me, and I could have
turned back and lost the music.

I BELIEVE IN MIRACLES!!

I'M RESTLESS, IRRITABLE, AND DISCONTENT

I'M SO LONESOME I COULD CRY

I CONFESS

FLANNERY O'CONNOR

ST. THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX

"If you are willing to bear serenely the trial of being displeasing to yourself, then you will be for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter."

GERALD MANLEY HOPKINS

"Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain."

DOROTHY DAY

"We have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community."

CARYLL HOUSELANDER

"I think all teddy bears should have knitted suits."

ROBERT BRESSON

"Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen."

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

"The world will be saved by beauty."

BILL CUNNINGHAM

“I don’t work I only know how to have fun every day…. It’s as true now as it ever was: He who seeks beauty will find it!”

JACQUES LUSSEYRAN: BLIND HERO OF THE FRENCH RESISTANCE

"The self-centered life has no place in the world of the deported. You must go beyond it, lay hold on something outside yourself."

EMILY DICKINSON

“I like a look of Agony/Because I know it’s true”

GLENN GOULD

"I've had all my life a tremendously strong sense that indeed there is a hereafter, and that the transformation of the spirit is a phenomenon which one must reckon and in light of which one must attempt to live one's life."

MARIA YUDINA

Sviatoslav Richter said of her: "One day she developed a crush on someone who didn’t return her advances. One can understand why; he must have been terrified of her. And so she challenged him to a duel."

ALBERT CAMUS

"I came to literature through worship."

RAYMOND CHANDLER

“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

“I have an almost ideological esthetic preference for nonprofessional actors who themselves are shreds of reality as is a landscape, a sky, the sun, a donkey passing along the road.”

PEACE PILGRIM

"There is a magic formula for resolving conflicts. It is this: Have as your objective the resolving of the conflict, not the gaining of advantage."

SIMON RODIA

“I had it in my mind to do something big—and I did.”

FRANZ WRIGHT

"Soon, soon, between one instant and the next, you will be well." From "Nude with Handgun and Rosary."

MARIA CALLAS

"I prepare myself for rehearsals like I would for a marriage."

WERNER HERZOG

HERZOG “Take a close and very long look into the eyes of a chicken…It's the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creature in this world."

CARLO CARRETTO

“The perfection of God is cast in a material which men almost despise, which they don’t consider worth searching for because of its simplicity, its lack of interest, because it is common to all men.”

JEAN-HENRI FABRÉ: THE HOMER OF THE INSECT WORLD

“After eighty-seven years of thought and observation, I say not merely that I believe in God—I can even say that I see him.”

DONALD EVANS

“It was vicarious traveling for me to a made-up world that I liked better than the one I was in…No catastrophes occur. There are no generals or battles or warplanes on my stamps….Sometimes I get so concentrated in these worlds I get confused. …It’s hard to get out.”

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

"Every man's life is a fairy tale written by God's fingers."

EDDIE AIKAU

“Eddie didn’t take off where everyone else took off. He took off deeper.” Eddie's brother Clyde.

MARTA BECKET

“Society laughs at old people’s dreams. They even laugh at dreams…until they come true.”

KAZUO OHNO

"The best thing someone can say to me is that while watching my performance they began to cry,”

BETTY MacDONALD

"'There's nothing as cozy as a piece of candy and a book."

LOUISE NEVELSON

"I feel that what people call by the word ‘scavenger’ is really a resurrection."

SVIATOSLAV RICHTER

"During one period of chronic depression, it was impossible for me to live without a plastic lobster that I took with me everywhere."

THE BROTHERS QUAY

"It's that little glint, that privileged look into a keyhole, and realizing suddenly that there's this little universe that's probably suffering and barely breathing, but it's pulsating, vibrating, with its own life. That in itself is a metaphor of the universe."

THE KING: "MAN, I REALLY LIKE VEGAS."

Jesus statue found in Elvis's bedroom at Graceland. Photo by H. King.

BILL MONROE

"Bluegrass has brought more people together and made more friends than any music in the world."

BILL W.

"We'll make it not because we're a better people--but because we're a weaker people."

BILL HICKS

"By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising...kill yourself. Thank you."

MORE FASCINATING PLACES

MY NEW BOOK! HOLY DESPERATION

PRAYING AS IF YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT

As St. Thérèse of Lisieux said, "All prayer arises from incompetence. Otherwise there is no need for it." Self-obsessed, easily distracted, full of petty judgments and irrational fears, I should know. Thoughts on the development of my own "inner life."

MY OTHER BOOKS

PARCHED

SIN, REDEMPTION, AND REHAB

REDEEMED

STUMBLING TOWARD GOD

SHIRT OF FLAME

ROAMING K'TOWN, L.A. WITH THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX

POOR BABY

A CHILD OF THE 60'S LOOKS BACK ON ABORTION

HOLY DAYS AND GOSPEL REFLECTIONS

COLLECTED WRITINGS FROM MAGNIFICAT

STUMBLE: VICE, VIRTUE, AND THE SPACE BETWEEN

ESSAYS ON CRISIS, SALVATION, AND THE DAILY TRAGICOMEDY OF THE CROSS

STRIPPED: CANCER, CULTURE AND THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING

MY GOING-AGAINST-MEDICAL-ADVICE "CANCER MEMOIR"

STRIPPED BOOK TRAILER: NATTERINGS FROM JOSHUA TREE...

LOADED: MONEY AND THE SPIRITUALITY OF ENOUGH

HOW I WENT FROM TRYING TO GET BY ON 27 CENTS A DAY TO A FULL, RICH LIFE OF SERVICE TO MY FELLOW SICK PEOPLE!